Comment by gcheong
8 hours ago
The geopolitics don't go away because the resources needed to switch to renewables aren't evenly distributed geographically:
https://www.statista.com/chart/33754/countries-with-the-larg...
https://www.techpolicy.press/us-critical-mineral-aggression-...
Battery storage is only a solution if you can actually generate a surplus of energy that can be stored, which is not a given.
We absolutely need to move off of fossil fuels but thinking that renewables are the only solution seems very short-sighted to me.
Contrary to their name, "rare earth metals" aren't actually rare, and for a lot of the renewables stack they aren't strictly necessary.
Take lithium batteries, for example. They were attractive for early BEVs because the consumer electronics market already developed an industry for them, and they were attractive for early grid storage because the BEVs scaled that industry up. But that doesn't mean you have to use lithium for grid storage, and when push comes to shove we could also use sodium-ion batteries, or iron redox flow batteries.
If your country no longer has access to iron and salt, I reckon you have bigger things to worry about.
Didn’t say they were rare I said they weren’t distributed equally which ends up creating geopolitical tensions and while newer chemistries might change the equation that doesn’t seem like what is going to happen at least in the short term.